View of Springfield on the Connecticut River

Alvan Fisher’s bucolic view of Springfield, Massachusetts, from across the Connecticut River typifies the kind of landscapes that were popular in the period. It describes a specific locale—note the steepled First Church on the far bank—using the well-known artistic vocabulary of the “Claudian” landscape. This compositional format, based on the widely emulated works of the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain, creates an ordered progression through space from a dark foreground stage framed by trees to a well-lit body of water in the middle ground to hazy hills in the background.